Scenic Catalysts

The Scenic Diorama, Public Bathhouse

This project takes the diorama; a modelling device used for generations in museums which enact a scene or historical event. In this instance the diorama is used with another agenda: to challenge the viewers innate preconceptions.

Situated in Parc de la Villette, a park designed by the Architect Bernard Tschumi. The park is in the North-Eastern periphery of Paris and is bordered by a ring-road, the Boulevard Périphérique and the suburbs Pantin and Aubervilliers. These suburbs have been the site of the largest refugee camps in Paris. By contrary inside Parc de la Villette are 26 follies, designed by Tschumi without a set purpose but with the ambition that the functions of the spaces would change over time, independent of form.  Contrarily, at present, many of the folies have been fenced and left as empty voids, lacking function and sit unused. A cruel juxtaposition resides: people forced to rough sleep next to unused and heavily policed buildings. 

The proposal is to inject a new public facility; a bathhouse, specifically designed for the refugee community into the centre of the park, transforming the existing folies by Tschumi and activating the underused canal. The project has a dual purpose: the first to create a useful facility for the Refugee’s in the area, a place to mingle with the rest of the public and to put the refugee into the public eye, in a public space. The second is to act as a political commentary on Tschumi’s design of the park and its current relationship with the Refugee’s, using 1:1 diorama’s. The folie, the new architecture of the baths and the diorama are designed to be read together, narrating a very specific agenda to comment on the design of public space, and challenging one’s predisposition of the refugee.

Introducing a place for refugees into a public space, catalyses conversations on how to design public